Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes
Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes is an assistant professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. His research focuses on the social and spatial determinants of health with special attention to place and neighborhood effects on health. Douglass-Jaimes uses geospatial analysis and qualitative research methods to highlight localized health disparities often masked when narrow constructions of place are considered. His work is situated in global health equity and is driven by an interest and inquiry in how conceptions of place and identity can be products of social marginalization as well as sources for community resilience. He has collaborated with environmental health scientists, social scientists, and epidemiologists as well as community-based organizations working on environmental health and environmental justice issues.

Joana Grande
Joana Grande is a Fulbright language teaching assistant. She graduated from the Federal Technological University of Paraná, in Letras (Literature and Linguistics of the Portuguese and English languages) in 2020.

Sarah Sarzynski
Sarah Sarzynski is an associate professor of history, an associate professor of Latin American history, and co-faculty advisor of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Sequence at Claremont McKenna College. Author of Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil (Stanford University Press, May 2018), which examines how entrenched beliefs about Brazil’s Northeast region as backwards, barbaric, and violent influenced the trajectory of projects intended to solve the problem of rural poverty during the Cold War. She is currently conducting research on a book tentatively titled, The Spaces Between Genocide and Ecocide: Amazonian Borderlands, 1922-1970, focusing on how indigenous and borderlands peoples engaged in the process of creating borderlands spaces in the three borders region of Peru, Colombia and Brazil.  

Norman Valencia
Norman Valencia is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Claremont McKenna College. Valencia is a Colombian professor whose work has focused on comparative approaches between Brazilian and Hispanic American literatures and cultures. He is interested in the relationships between literature, culture, and politics in Latin America. He is author of Retóricas del poder y nombres del padre en la literatura latinoamericana paternalismo, política y forma literaria en Graciliano Ramos, Juan Rulfo, João Guimarães Rosa y José Lezama Lima, co-author of Pensar el Brasil hoy: Teorías literarias y crítica cultural en el Brasil contemporáneo, and translator of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. 

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as "among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated." Barry is widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic, and emotional range of American comics, namely her seminal comic strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which ran in weekly alternative newspapers for two decades.

Barry has authored 21 books and an album-length spoken-word collection, been a commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), had a regular monthly feature in magazines such as Esquire and Mother Jones, and appeared as a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. She adapted her first novel, The Good Times are Killing Me, into a long running, award-winning play. Her book, Making Comics, was awarded the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book + Best Publication Design. 

Her 2022 books are reissues of Come Over, Come Over (Drawn & Quarterly, January 4, 2022), My Perfect Life (Drawn & Quarterly, July 5, 2022), and It's So Magic (Drawn & Quarterly, September 20, 2022).

Barry is an associate professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including lifetime achievement awards from both the Museum of Wisconsin Arts and the National Cartoonists Society. In 2019, Lynda Barry was honored as a MacArthur Fellow for “enabling artists and non-artists alike to take creative risks,” in her professorship, workshops, and public talks.

Barry earned a degree from Evergreen State College during its early experimental period (1974-78), studying with painter and writing teacher Marilyn Frasca.

Professor Barry’s CMC presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.

Photo credit: Lynda Barry

Food for Thought: Podcast with Lynda Barry